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Monday, April 18, 2016

Only you can cool out desires

Only you can cool my desire

~ I’m on Fire a Johnny Cash song


What can I say about a woman who knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off?


Scott Rogowsky has been getting video of the reactions of New Yorkers to such book titles asDefinitely Not Porn | So What Are You Looking At? Mind Your Own Business; Human Taxidermy: A Beginner’s Guide; Slut-Shaming Your Baby; and 1,000 Places to See Before You’re Executed by ISIS.
 New York Daily News

Chancellor, The Hon Michael Egan, with Cate Blanchett
Chancellor, The Hon Michael Egan, with Dr Cate Blanchett
Throughout a distinguished career in the law, government and writing, Andrew Tink BA LLB has made significant contributions to the cultural and political life of New South Wales. Today, he was recognised for these contributions with a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Macquarie University. Former Chair of the PAC Andrew Tink A Brilliant Man like Mike Egan


* I would give some funds to Macquarie Uni as well if I was rich...Property magnates turned philanthropists Susan and Isaac Wakil are behind the largest gift ever received in the University's 165-year history. Millions to Sydney University


Mike Egan can inspire students as much as late Steve Jobs. To boot, Mike does not mind if kids run and scream during the Graduation Ceremony as he has lot more patience than Steve... It is nice to be at a formal function where kids can be kids ...
You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Memories of 18 April 10nish Macquarie University’s April 2016 graduation series commences on Tuesday 12 April, with more than 10 700 guests expected on campus ... Champagne and glorious food everywhere ;-) Niharika is among the lucky ones  

“They want to be excited, and upset, and made miserable, to have their flesh set creeping, to gloat and quake over scenes of misfortune, injustice, violence, and cruelty, with the discomfiture and punishment of somebody to make the ending ‘happy.’ The only sort of horror they dislike is the horror that they cannot fasten on some individual whom they can hate, dread, and finally torture after revelling in his crime.”
~ George Bernard Shaw, “Told You So” (Saturday Review, December 7, 1895)

The language of politics and literature are entirely different and so are the mentalities. Politicians are concerned with `far-reaching’ goals, personal games, gangster-style tricks. What interests me is human fate. What does me good is bad for politicians: what suits them I find indigestible. We use two separate styles. I have tried to use the conditional. I hesitate, I appeal to conscience. I dislike the imperative, exclamation mark, black and white divisions.” What interests me is human fate

What word-processing wrought. The shift from typewriter to computer changed the way artists and intellectuals wrote. Derrida, for one, saw that his paragraphs were too long ... 
CaoFei
That one is called “The Birth of RMB City.”  Here is an article on RMB City in Second Life.  Here are more images.  Here is a NYT article about her work, some call her the most important Chinese artist born after the Cultural Revolution.  Here is the artist’s home page


 Adult colouring book craze prompts global pencil shortage
Independent, 22/3/16. A surge in the number of people buying adult colouring books has threatened pencil stocks world-wide as manufacturers struggle to cope with an increased demand for quality crayons.  "People like colouring-in because they are fed up with digital.”

Nabokov made hundreds of magnified drawings of butterfly genitalia. What can his lepidoptery tell us about his literary output?... My Butterfly 

A Computer Painted This Rembrandt
Popular Mechanics, 6/4/16. The system studied 346 Rembrandts in all. It was then hooked up to a 3D printer that became the artificial artist's medium, laying down 13 layers of "paint-based UV ink" in a way that mimics not only the layout and palette of a Rembrandt but also the three-dimensional physical structure of the painting


Forget what world leaders say. If you want to understand what they are really up to, look at the paintings that hang behind them at press conferences and summit meetings, or when they pause with apparent spontaneity along a corridor to answer a reporter’s question
*Art as symbols 

The Spanish village of Borja, population 4,931, has experienced anunexpected tourist boom of late. But the estimated 30,000 annual visitors aren’t there to seek out the town’smedieval architecture, or its archeological museum, or even the region’s emerging local wines. Instead, they’re in Borja to see Ecce homo, a fresco in the town’s Sanctuary of Mercy church that was famously botched in a 2012 restoration *Loving bad art

“‘The British spy eavesdropping station GCHQ rang me up and said ‘we’ve detected an early copy of this book on the Internet’,’ Newton told Australia’s ABC Radio in an interview.” Huffington Post 

Not even low interest rates are enticing consumers to borrow Christian Science Monitor Why should they? The idea that consumers should borrow to buy things, except very long-lived assets with generally high resale value like houses (and cars are not in that category) is a bad practice that has become mainstream due to marketing, unstable job tenures, and weak wage growth.

We hear music with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles. Do we also hear with the color of our skin?


What are the keys to an effective apology?  Article Is on wiley.com

Tennis, the most isolating of games, draws the obsessive and brooding, those in search of agony and transcendence. Literary types, in other words... Literary Types 

It makes Don Boudreax’s Quotation of the Day very timely:
Democracy imposes few limits on the power and reach of the state.  Legislators are unrestrained from organizing themselves into predatory majorities; pennies and dimes are taken from an unwary majority and dollars are delivered to alert interest groups.
In this case, six pennies at a time out of every dollar spent at the track

If You See Something, Say Something — David Lyle

Canberra Times, 4/4/16. The extraordinary lengths public service bosses will go to in pursuit of internal critics has been exposed by a Fair Work Commission unfair dismissal case. And the Commission's decision has dealt a serious blow to the Australian Public Service's crackdown on the social media use of its employees.



Small Business Labs, 24/3/16. HBR's Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories has a great 2X2 matrix (below) showing the 4 different types of work likely over the next decade.
*
Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories – HBR



Will tomorrow's smart office be a saviour or a spy?
BBC, 31/3/16. At Deloitte's headquarters in Amsterdam, workers can control the lights, heating and blinds via an app, while in London building consultant Arup is experimenting with smart desks - embedding sensors in them and hooking them up to smartphone apps to allow people to control lighting and heating


"Court Says Flying Spaghetti Monster Is Not a 'Religion'": Howard Friedman had this post yesterday at his "Religion Clause" blog

“Both stories share the premise of a human body undergoing a change so abrupt and so drastic that the old body is unrecognizable in the new one. But there is a key difference. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one non-descript morning and finds he is a human-size bug. But in Blackass, Furo Wariboko wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a white man while his buttocks remain black.”  The Guardian 

 Smart Florida high schooler develops electrical generator that costs just $12 McClatchy 



A brilliant, devoted journalist, trailblazer, and visionary leader who made everyone feel valued, former Herald Publisher Kevin Peterson died this week The tribute from the Calgary Herald where Kevin was a journalist and editor

“Hamilton: The Revolution” is out of stock on Amazon, with an expected wait of nine to 12 days for a copy. It was No. 2 on Barnes & Noble’s website. Grand Central Publishing spokesman Jimmy Franco says “Hamilton: The Revolution” already is going into its third printing, for a planned total of 210,000 copies. Yahoo! (AP)

Police officers were posting homophobic and sexually degrading posts on social media before a NSW Police Integrity Commission investigation homed in on the racial and sexist harassment of an MP Social Media and LEAs